


New Amsterdam

by blessedthrice



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: AU, Drabbles, F/F, Gen, M/M, Multi, New York City, bb erwin, bb erwin and the big city, eruri - Freeform, twink erwin
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-06-07 22:43:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6828163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blessedthrice/pseuds/blessedthrice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A chronicle of the life of Erwin Smith, a young queer man coming of age in New York City.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sugar

**Author's Note:**

> hi guys,
> 
> so this is the first in a series of drabbles featuring erwin as a true blue nyc teen. bc, frankly, the world needs more teenwin and twinkwin and also bc i love new york city even though living there was a literal nightmare. ill be updating this regularly, with a variety of drabbles all functioning in the same universe. thank you all for your time in reading this, and ty in advance for any comments and kudos! ily all

The cloud of sugar settled like snow in his hair and eyelashes, made thick by the cool mist of seven o’clock. The sky was gray with ribbons of pink on the far horizon, glimmers of the sun which would soon breach the uneven silhouettes of the buildings downtown and turn blue, and gold. The bubbling sounds of rush hour swelled like blood through the gridlock of the streets, car horns and rumbling engines and an orchestra of voices which blended together into a familiar song he called ‘the morning traffic.’ An old man in thick glasses rushed between the blinking cars, arm waving desperately as he dove into the nearest cab. The driver shouted over his shoulder, the man shouted back. The yellow cab pulled out of the line of waiting cars, zipped along the curb, pulled onto a side street, and disappeared. Across the street an old woman in a bright red kaftan walked two dogs, Afghan hounds, who sashayed like belly dancers toward Washington Square Park. He watched them go, his breath coming out in blue puffs of fog against the fall chill.

On the sidewalk where he stood, an old woman pushing a blue cart full of plastic shopping bags bumped his ankle with her wheel, cursing him in a language that he did not understand. Her spit hit the ground in front of his shoes with a loud splat, and he smiled apologetically, moving politely off the curb. He could hear her mumbling as she puttered up the narrow street, and he wished vaguely that he’d thought to say ‘good morning’. 

The delivery truck in the alleyway gave a low rumble. Another cloud of sugar soared overhead, as one and then another ten pound bag was unloaded from the truck’s bed by a graying man in blue jeans and a white tee-shirt, who was smoking a cigarette. The man had lines in his face like a map, and gray eyes and dark brows and hair that was slicked back on his head with pomade. His tan arms were thick with ribbons of muscle and tendon, his hands stained powder-white like the apron he wore tied tight about his lean waist. When he shouted into the bed of the truck, his thick Bronx accent rang clear as a whistle down Sullivan Street. 

Some mornings, Erwin Smith would stop just to watch the man move, enraptured by the ripple of muscles beneath his white shirt. The strength in his legs and back spoke of decades of hard labor, of ten and twenty pound bags of sugar and great sacks full of flour, which he would pull from the pallets and hand down into waiting arms, as if they were full of down feathers. Erwin would watch until he was sure someone would notice, and then he’d bustle past towards school, blazer pulled tight around his narrow shoulders. 

Today, as they had for past six months, those tan arms dropped each heavy bag into a waiting pair of long, thin ones, golden brown and full of ink beneath the skin. The boy was his age, maybe. He didn’t look any younger or older, although he never went to school. The boy had appeared one day in April, in black slim fit jeans and a t-shirt that had the arm holes cut so wide that you could see his muscular sides and his ribs and a peak of dark nipple between the fabric. He wore a black baseball cap over his dark hair, which spelled out “nola” in white embroidered letters. He wore that hat everyday, as far as Erwin could tell, and Erwin had never seen him without it. 

Now that it was fall, the boy had taken to wearing plain black t-shirts. Sometimes the t-shirts said things, like names of bands or places he wondered if the boy had ever actually been to. He always wore black jeans with them, and heavy steel-toed boots which laced up around the ankles. Only recently, he’d added a black leather jacket to fend off the cold, and a pair of fingerless gloves. 

Erwin wondered often if the boy was the man’s son. They had the same cat-like gray eyes, the same arched brows, the same general moue. They both talked in thick, rapid-fire accents, heavy with slurs and slang. Their arms seemed linked by something thick, like blood, the way they moved exactly in tandem, the way their biceps went taut in exactly the same way when their hands hoisted the massive bags of sugar down from the morning delivery truck. 

He found them inexplicably fascinating--it was why he had been fifteen minutes late to his first class everyday since school had started again. He didn’t doubt he’d have to explain to Sister Antonia, once again, that he’d gotten waylaid by some remarkable tragedy or unfortunate chain of events that he could not possibly be held personally accountable for. He didn’t doubt either, the inevitability that that salty, frigid, old devout would reprimand his knuckles with the flat of a ruler in tribute to some archaic practice he couldn’t believe was still legal but which no student at St. Agnes’s had ever been brave enough to challenge her about. 

As he watched the two of of them on this particular misty morning, Erwin found himself noticing more about the boy than he ever had before. It was his stature--it occurred to Erwin for the first time that the boy’s stature was small, almost fragile. He couldn’t have been more than chest height compared to Erwin, and yet--the presence he commanded was undeniably massive. The dichotomy held Erwin’s attention like the lights above the East River at night, when he would ride the L alone with his sketchbook in his lap and his headphones turned up so loud he couldn’t hear the whirring of the train’s wheels as they slid across the metal track.

As another cloud of sugar rose from the open bed of the delivery truck, the boy paused, halting in his methodical movements just long enough to shake the black hat off the top of his head, dusting a layer of white sugar from the brim. Erwin felt his hands begin to tremble at his sides, pulsing from the radical force of his own heartbeat. 

Atop the boy’s head were waves of black, inky hair, which, set free, rolled across his forehead and settled low over one eye. The sides and the back of the skull were shaved short, revealing a long meandering scar along the side of the pale, delicate neck. Erwin wanted to touch it, to trace it with his fingers. He wanted to look into those gray eyes and find something, anything. Anything at all that was different from what he saw in his own blue ones when he looked into shop windows and bus doors at his reflection.

As if beckoned by these traitor thoughts, the boy looked at him. A golden, tattooed arm came up to wipe the sweat from his forehead, before the hat was jammed back over that beautiful, flowing hair, hiding it and the scar from Erwin’s sight. Erwin looked back into those cat-like eyes with reverence, too embarrassed to look away now that he’d been caught. After a moment which seemed like a millennium, the boy turned back to the truck, his shoulders slumped as if he were extremely bored. Without looking back, he reached up and scratched under the brim of his hat, leaning one hip against the ramp that had been propped against the truck’s platform. The overall picture was one of a beauty so haughty and brutally delectable that it made Erwin sweat at the palms. 

Face flushed pink and heart thudding like a jackhammer, Erwin clutched his bookbag tight against his shoulder and crossed the narrow street, hurrying along the sidewalk towards the train station that would take him uptown to school. 

The day passed slowly, so unremarkable after his morning commute that the final bell left him feeling unusually anxious. His skin itched, burned as though he’d been set fire. His clothes had become shapeless and strange, hanging from his body the way that wet sheets hung limp from the clothing lines between the apartments on Avenue B. His ankles, which jutted out from the rolled bottoms of his black jeans, and the collar bones revealed by the three undone buttons of his starched oxford shirt seemed clumsy, milky and adolescent and painfully his. His hands, with their wide, large palms and long, bony fingers felt untuned and awkward, incapable of gripping a pencil let alone gripping something substantial, like a possibly fragile neck or a long, golden arm. 

It was something about them, he thought, as he yanked off his blazer and his tie, burying them in the depths of his bag. The shirt went next, replaced by a long-sleeved gray fisherman’s sweater that he’d taken to carrying around in his backpack just in case he got cold. It was sanctuous now, protecting him from that gnawing ache that had settled in his gut.  Catching his reflection in the window of the cathedral, Erwin experienced a moment’s escape from the oppressive claustrophobia that had come over him since the boy with the black ‘nola’ hat had wiped the sugar from the brim, revealing his dark, rolling waves of hair, and an untouchable scar.

He caught his reflection again in the windows of the 2 train, as it sped between stations towards his stop at Christopher Street. Standing, his scalp almost grazed the overhead rail, so that he had to stoop in order to get a good grip on it. His body, when hunched, seemed impossibly long and narrow, like dry pasta being forced into a too-small pot. The sweater seemed to drown him, making his torso seem strangely triangular in comparison to his exceedingly thin hips. His glasses, too, fit him poorly, sliding down his straight nose so that he was constantly peeking over the top of the horn-rimmed edges. The conclusive image was one that made him feel unbearably nervous, his body aching to pupate and to change. To become. 

As he walked along the avenue towards home, Erwin’s hands made frantic, listless passages over his body. He felt the close shave of his hair at the back of his head, the too long muss of bleached blonde curls on top. He felt the boniness of his face and shoulders, the pointiness of his knuckles and elbows. He felt the roughness at the backs of his ears, where the skin had rebelled against the absence of the typical studs he wore up and down each side. He traced the chapped, swollen planes of his mouth, wondering what it would feel like to kiss, or to be kissed the way that he imagined the boy with the black ‘nola’ hat got kissed or did kissing. So enraptured with these thoughts and explorations had he become that he hardly noticed when he came to a halt in front of the small, red brick bakery on Sullivan Street. The delivery truck had long since disappeared, as had the gridlock of traffic and the Afghan hounds and the pink dust of the sunrise and the boy with the black ‘nola’ hat.

Most afternoons, Erwin would wander inside the bakery and spend his saved lunch money on a cup of coffee and an unbelievably moist poppyseed muffin, which he would pick at while he pretended to be doing his homework. He’d sneak glances at the boy over the tops of his books, watching as he pounded his fist into wads of cold dough and rolled them out flat on the counter. 

He waffled now, glancing down the unusually quiet street towards home. Had the boy always noticed him watching? Did it make him uncomfortable, the way Erwin felt uncomfortable when he looked at himself? He shuffled his sneakers on the concrete, the ache in his gut budding like a wound. 

The bell above the door chimed as he pushed through the door, clutching the straps of his backpack with both hands. His breath left him in a woosh, as though he’d been holding it for a very long time. The boy was there, a pen tucked in between his ear and his black ‘nola’ hat. He was standing behind the counter, a phone clutched lazily in the crook of his shoulder, muttering lacklusterly into the mouth piece. Erwin could just make out the dull monotone of his voice as he slid into a chair, dropping his bag on the floor by his feet. 

The bakery was mostly empty, save for two women drinking tea in the far corner and an old man playing solitaire at a table near the counter. In the absence of patrons, the clink of porcelain against the saucers was extraordinarily loud. It seemed to blot out the music playing overhead, a familiar song that he’d heard before but couldn’t place. 

_The girls are crying, and the boys are masturbating--_

He wondered if it was a song the boy had picked out himself. It suited him, he thought, the way the color black suited him. The way that long, ugly scar suited him. The way Erwin might suit him, if Erwin could become something. Someone. 

“You want a cawfee, or something?”

The blood drained from Erwin’s cheeks. The boy had slid under the counter, was standing like he’d been planted beside him, with one hip popped and a pad of paper in his fist. His cat-like eyes bore into Erwin’s skull like a power drill, puncturing the thick, calcified bone and going straight for the grey matter. His heart was struggling to form a beat, to catch a rhythm. He stared at his strange white hands and felt uncomfortable.

“Sure,” he said, in a hush. The boy made an impatient sound in the back of his mouth.

“You reading Marx again?” 

Erwin looked down at the book clutched between his hands. 

“Nabokov,” he said weakly.

“Tch. Pretentious bastard. Want a muffin, too?”

“Okay.”

“Yeah, alright.”

When the sky had turned inky blue, Erwin closed his book and laid it tenderly in his bag. The empty mug beside him had left a ring in the napkin it had been resting on, the one he’d eaten his muffin off of. He crumpled that in his fist, sliding it into his pocket instead of into the garbage, though he couldn’t explain why. 

The bakery was completely empty, save for the boy with the black ‘nola’ hat who had just finished sweeping and had begun turning over chairs and setting them on top of clean tables for the night. Erwin tried not to watch him, focusing instead on hoisting his backpack onto his shoulders, and pushing his glasses back up his nose. He carried his mug in both of his hands to the bus bin, mind still mulling over that ring of sugar on the brim of the black hat, on one tan arm swiping over a damp forehead. 

“You taking off?”

Erwin froze, turning back towards the boy, who had stopped his work to lean casually against the edge of a table. The hat was gone again, twirling slowly between two tan, deft hands. He nodded, enraptured by the simple movement. When the boy spoke again, he forced himself to pull his eyes away, meeting a gaze that seemed to look not at him, but inside of him, like blood beneath a telescope. 

“See you Monday.”

“Yeah, see you.”

The bell above the door twinkled as he pushed it open, the nine o’clock mist wrapping itself like a blanket over his body. The city had gone hush, like a hand pressed over wanting lips. The lights dazzled around him like stars, smashed glass glittering from the gutters and reflecting streetlights which changed although there were no cars to mind them. 

He stood in front of the bakery for a long time, looking into the empty alley where the delivery truck would be idling come Monday morning. He imagined the boy with the black ‘nola’ hat, golden arms stretched out, reaching for a bag of sugar. The white cloud would settle like dust over all of them, and he would cross the expanse between himself and his blossoming desires, and with steady hands brush the layer of sugar from a mouth that was so used to kissing, and _become._


	2. Ulysses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erwin and Levi have a certain ritual whenever they fuck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is a lot of james joyce and very blatant bottom!erwin. hope you enjoy it xo   
> thank you so much to everyone who read sugar and left feedback, you guys are amazing and it means the world to me  
> special thanks again to birbwin, and also momtaku for being so super supportive of this project

“...and Gibraltar as a girl, where I was a Flower--of--of the mountain, yes... when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or, _shit._ I mean, used _comma,_ or shall I wear a red yes-- _no,_ red _comma,_ yes...”

His eyelashes brushed against his cheeks, and his voice quivered, plucked like a harp string by a delicate finger. Sweat rolled between the curves of the muscles along his spine, pooling at the small of his back like water in the basin of a sink, the kind whose faucet dripped all day without stopping, like rain.

He was leaking, loose, an old pipe stirred from slumber by the hard turn of a long-rusted tap. Every tendon in his body was taut, pulled so tight he thought he might snap like a rubber band. He imagined himself as a rubber band, laced between golden fingers and stretched for cat’s cradle. He’d be anything for those fingers. For these blue and white afternoons.

A black car passed slowly on the street below. The wind sucked the curtains, white, through the open window. He watched them flutter in the breeze, reminded of the flags on 42nd street, the ones next to the bagel cart where they sold bags of fresh mango and sea salt for two dollars a piece. He could taste the juice in his mind’s eye, as if it were dribbling down his chin.

“Don’t stop.”

He remembered the book in his hands and dragged his attention back to it, scanning the dizzying wall of text for his place. He’d nearly lost track, nearly forgotten their agreement. He pressed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and shivered.

“Yes, and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall. And I thought, well, as well him as another, and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again, yes-- _oh god, yes.”_

The book nearly tumbled from his grasp as a new flood of pleasure racked him, shook him. He thought suddenly of the waves at Riis Beach. Three Tuesdays ago. Late afternoon, the sun blooming like carnations from the Atlantic. The sound of them, then, like the curtains now, fluttering, fluttering, fluttering. He thought of warm hands beneath his shirt, his shoulders sinking into cold sand. Seagulls flocking in Vs towards the shore, and his heart, fluttering, fluttering, fluttering.

“Erwin, remember my rules.”

He wet his lips with a pink tongue. Blonde hair stuck to his forehead in dark ringlets, matted with sweat at the temples and ears. A mask of warm blood crawled up the length of his neck and along the top of his nose, brimming beneath his pale skin and making dusty pink clouds on his cheeks. He let out a breath of air. It floated from between his lips with a mewl in its sails.

“And--and then he asked me: would I yes to say yes….would I yes to...mm. Would I yes to say y-yes, my mountain flower? And first I put my arms around him--”

His glasses slipped off his face, folding like a hand of cards on Levi’s golden stomach. Erwin blinked, confused, realizing belatedly that he’d knocked them off himself. His head had tipped forward, horn-rimmed glasses falling like water over the edge of a cup. His body pulsed with want, thighs flexing and unflexing, hands stiff from how hard he’d been clutching the book between his fingers. His knees ached from supporting his weight, his feet numb from being tucked beneath him.

A warmer ache had bloomed between his thighs. He rode it recklessly, following its trail like a tourist, finger gliding along the glass of a map that might lead him home. He was a psychic traveler, arriving unexpectedly at a new conclusion. He was new baptized, fresh at the altar. It was an oral tradition, and an oral fixation--the sort of thing you passed down with tongues in bathroom stalls and in the backseats of cabs and in the dark corners of empty train platforms in the early hours of the morning, when your only witnesses were drunks and exhibitionists. It was a new religion, a compulsory denomination, a physical devotional. With Levi, founded on Levi, enveloped in Levi. Levi, Levi, Levi.

From his angle, in the blue hush of twilight, he thought that Levi glowed. His body rippled like the moon in the wet streets of downtown, white, dizzy, fully there in one moment and in another not at all. He was milk in the crevices of a wood floor. He was the train that pulled away the moment you hit the turnstile. Almost, not quite. And why should he be? When he was so much and Erwin was so little?

Warm hands smoothed the wet hair back from his forehead. He could feel Levi fumbling, each minute shift sending darts of pleasure from the base of his spine up to the nape of his neck. Erwin hummed, blinking the boy back into focus as his glasses were slipped tenderly back onto his face.

“Stay with me,” Levi begged. His voice was low, salted with sleep. His hand made lazy circles on Erwin’s back, thumbing each notch in his spine like a hand over the tops of a garden fence.

His face flushed with shame. They’d had their Ithaca moment already. Erwin was changing their story, relaunching their ships. Hadn’t they been adrift long enough? They’d read all of Poe and most of Woolf, a fraction of Hemingway and even one Fitzgerald. They’d made it halfway through Nabokov and stopped. Now they’d had their Ithaca moment, so why was he still adrift? Couldn’t Troy wait?

His body twitched. Any tighter and he’d snap, he was sure of it. There was nothing that made sense of them, that justified his weight on golden thighs. Warm hands on his frail back. Gray eyes on his pale face. 

He’d be anything for Levi, except himself.

“Please.”

The boy in the black ‘nola’ hat had never asked him for a thing. Six months and not one singular thing, not even a few dollars for a cab home that night that Erwin had lost his composure, had lost his cool, had pushed him out of his bed and out of his room and out of his life for good. Except it hadn’t been for good, because Levi never asked him for a fucking thing. He waited on the corners of city streets with lit cigarettes, with a crooked smile, with crooked teeth. Waited for an apology, waited for permission, waited for trust.

Erwin swallowed the knot in his throat, lifting the book with shaking hands.

“And first I put my arms around him, yes, and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts, all perfume, yes--and his heart was going like mad and yes, I said, yes, I will, Yes. _Yes. Yes. Yes._ Levi, _yes._ ”

Their mixture was milky, the wetness of Levi’s stomach and the drip between Erwin’s thighs. The wind changed directions, pulling the white curtains back inside the small window, the ripples casting shadows over their faces in the half light. Two cabs idled at the corner, shouting between the windows of their separate cars. He couldn’t see their eyes.

He collapsed onto the bed, body spread like steam over the sheets. The book lay abandoned at the edge of the mattress, wedged into the space between the bed and the wall like any lost thing would be. 

“Levi, Levi, Levi.”

He chanted the name like a song, like the echo of a harp string pulled by a delicate finger. Golden arms encircled him, drew him close. With their heads pressed together, nose to nose, he could almost believe that they were in love.

Erwin’s heart sank like a rock into the sea. Fluttering, fluttering, fluttering.


	3. The Gardener

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A record-breaking heatwave hits the city, and twenty-three year old Erwin Smith is late for class.

Erwin Smith woke in a pool of his own sweat, a trickle of perspiration slipping down the valley of his lower back. His naked body was tangled in damp sheets, facing the sunlight pouring in through his open window. He’d propped it open hastily the night before, with an old copy of Crime and Punishment that he’d started to read and never finished. The half-empty beer bottle he’d been nursing before bed was glinting in those oppressive rays, causing his eyes to blink and then squeeze shut. The back of his eyelids blossomed in pinks--salmon, peach, and pale orange. When he opened them, he could see out across the street, into the open window of the apartment facing his. A girl standing naked in front of her mirror, combing out her hair with her fingers. He rolled onto his back, stretched, and threw his arm across his face.

Record-breaking temperatures had been projected throughout the tri-state area, and the city soaked up the heat like a sponge. It swept over the burroughs like a fog, thick and hazy and humid, and the smell of thirteen million tightly-packed bodies permeated the walls of his pre-war apartment, tugging him unwillingly out of bed and into the small, windowless kitchenette. He reached around the sink and flicked on the shower, yanking the curtain closed as he crossed the room to put the kettle on the stove. An opened, well-loved container of instant coffee sat on the small expanse of counter beside it, and he spooned some into the only somewhat clean mug he could find. 

With the water on to boil, he shuffled into the shower, yawning as he stepped beneath the lukewarm spray. 

The kitchen sink and the shower shared a pipe, and sometimes drained into one another. It was one of those Manhattan things, those bleak, numbly accepted realities of living in a city that had been built up and not out. His building, in particular, was a relic. Constructed in the late twenties on the narrow crest of Broome Street, the building was a collage of weathered red brick and wrought iron fire escapes, built above a bakery where they sold vegan, flourless cakes. He’d never eaten there before, but he knew the guy that owned the place--an elderly Vietnamese man who called himself Don Vito and sold loose cigarettes and rare baseball cards out of an old tin box he kept beneath the register. 

Erwin lived on the fifth floor, and only hated it when he was drunk or bringing home a stranger. His landlord had finally put a bike rack in the basement two years ago, so at the very least, he didn’t have to haul his bicycle up and down the stairs any longer. His landlord in question was an absent but prompt Ukrainian, who was good about sending maintenance when Erwin called, and diplomatic when it came to handling complaints about the building’s other tenants. Overall, Erwin liked his apartment, even though he couldn’t close the bathroom door if he was sitting down on the toilet, and half the outlets didn’t work if it got to be anywhere above eighty or below thirty degrees. It was the first place he’d ever lived in that was his, absolutely, and he relished in the freedom of it. 

When the kettle began to whistle he was toweling off on the shower mat. He wrapped the towel around his hips, fastening it with one hand and turning off the burner with the other. Faint shuffling and groaning from beyond the thin kitchen wall told him that the sound had woken his roommate, and he smiled apologetically. Oluo was dead to the world before noon, and was generally miserable to be around until evening hours. A Belgian immigrant born in Luxembourg, Oluo had spent the entirety of his childhood in Berlin, and had moved to the city from Barcelona eight years ago on a temporary work visa that had expired after six months, and which he’d never bothered to renew. He’d had big dreams of making it as a poet, but had lost his vision after three years of working temporary positions in the warehouses down at Chelsea Piers just to feed himself. Now he worked nights as a bartender, and moonlighted as a DJ and party promoter on the side. He’d started making silkscreen prints of chip bags and candy wrappers two years ago, gaining an in to the coveted art scene through an ex girlfriend whose parents were the sole inheritors of the Colgate Toothpaste fortune. That was how he and Erwin had met--at a gallery in Soho where the open bar had closed after only an hour, which the Wall Street Journal had described as “nothing new or exceptional.”

Oluo wasn’t reliable as a friend, but he did have a remarkably well-honed survival instinct that made Erwin feel comfortable. Oluo never failed to pay his rent on time, even if he couldn’t be counted on for much else. An alcoholic, a narcissist, and a coke fiend, Oluo Bozado would miss your funeral but still remember to pay the electric bill. They had a workable, balanced relationship, one that Erwin didn’t feel obligated to pour himself too deeply into, and which suited his needs just fine. It was more than he could say for most of his friends.

Erwin drank his coffee as he dressed himself, pulling on a pair of vintage blue jeans and a second-hand t-shirt from a Blondie concert that had taken place at CBGB in 1977. The shirt was too small, coming just to the high waistband of his pants, paper thin, and unravelling at the hem. He never washed it for fear of destroying it, and it smelled like every cologne he’d worn since freshman year of college. He was trying to pick out a particular scent while brushing his teeth--something familiar, but not his. An ex-boyfriend--but which one? Erwin wasn’t much of a monogamist but when he did date he sought out intimacy like a moth to flame. Realistically, it could be anyone. 

He mulled it over from the bathroom to the kitchen, where he made toast, and from the kitchen back to his bedroom, where he shoved his necessities into a leather backpack which he then slung over one shoulder. By the time he’d locked his front door and made it down the first landing, he’d forgotten all about the cologne, his mind drifting back to the heat, to his dreams the night before, to that boy from six nights ago who’d gotten on the wrong train at Essex and had put a hand on his shoulder to ask him for directions...

Steam was pouring out of the subway grates as he pounded down the steps of the Delancey Street station, swiping through the turnstile with the ease of someone born and raised on the MTA. The 179th-bound F roared up to the platform just as he pounded down the last few steps, and he jogged through the open doors and squeezed himself between two men who were having an animated conversation about the construction down on Broad Street.  
The commute uptown was standing room only, so crowded that he could hardly feel the A/C in the car. He closed his eyes, sweat rolling from his temples and down his cheek to his chin, slipping from his neck into the collar of his shirt. Music pulsed into his ears through his headphones, and he allowed himself to drift off with it, to somewhere else--something else. The waves on Riis beach. Small but tactile hands against his back. Gray eyes. 

He nearly missed his connection at 14th street, stumbling off the train just as the doors were about to close. White sneakers squelched against the wet concrete, echoing in the station as he sprinted to the next platform, taking the stairs two at a time, backpack thumping against his spine as he ran. The doors of the 1 towards Van Cortlandt Park were about to snap shut as he leapt between them, his second stroke of good luck in one morning. It was remarkably less crowded on the 1 uptown, and the sudden gust of cool air caused him to sigh audibly in relief. He sat down hard on the end of the bench, leaning his forehead against the cool metal bars and closing his eyes again. The song he’d selected on his walk to the F was still playing--stuck on a permanent loop. 

_Well the weather out here’s just the same, but the garden that you planted remains..._

Clouds of white sugar billowed across the salmon pinks of his eyelids, drifting like snow into the folds of his clothes, into the part of his lips. Half asleep, he could nearly taste it.

When he got off the train at 116th street, his heart was beating slow and hard in his chest. He imagined a boxer inside of his ribs, punching out towards the surface and finding only the cage around his lungs. Trapped forever in a cycle of in, out, in, out, in, out. 

The first few chords began again as he stepped out into the sunlight, the red and white brick faces of the university rising up like hands, sterile and elegant in a city of blinding lights and constant noise. The turquoise rooftops of Columbia University spread out in front of him like the cakes in the window of the shop beneath his apartment--serene. Decadent. Untouchable. 

In the shade of University Hall, he could be anyone--Lucien Carr, or Allen Ginsberg, or Langston Hughes. Jack Kerouac was in his shoes, his blood. In the shade of the white stone arches he could have written a whole generation, a new way of looking at the world. In the sunlight he was just himself, fifteen minutes late for a class he hadn’t really wanted to take and rarely if ever showed up to. 

The lecture hall was cool, at least. Passing through the heavy doors was like coming up for air. He’d be lying if he said it wasn’t half the reason he’d rolled out of bed--just to sit in the air conditioning and maybe take a nap in the library afterwards. He took a seat in the very back row, slumping down amidst two-hundred other sinking bodies, unraveling from the heat. The professor’s low, pompous droning was thicker than the smog outside, lulling half the class into a state of soporific apathy but charging ever onward, undaunted. Erwin’s blue eyes immediately glazed over, drifting to the intricate crown moulding along the high ceiling. He read worlds in those lines, imagining steady hands, long legs, tall ladders. He would walk under them and look up, a sky of men’s bodies drenched in sweat--of artists hands covered in plaster. It seemed as though hours passed in that half-dream, his mind deliciously blank. 

“Some of the greatest poets of our time were, in fact, apolitical--the postmodern perspective focused instead on--yes, what is it?”

Erwin glanced up, face leaned heavily against an open palm. The lecture hall remained silent and uneventful, the monotony broken only by a single golden arm held lazily up above the crowd. The professor’s eyes were fixed on it, and Erwin could make out the lines around his mouth, drawn together in irritation. 

“The greatest white poets, you mean.”

Erwin was sitting up now, lifting slightly out of his seat to see over the heads of the barely conscious people in the row in front of him. The voice was soft, toneless, masculine, familiar. Erwin could imagine it in his ear, ghosting over the shell of it like a mist. He could feel the edges of its lilt, like chalk on his hands.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

The professor was ruffled now, his mustache twitching as more of the class stirred, heads lifting and murmurs beginning to rise up from around the room. The boy with the golden arm spoke again, smug this time.

“I’d point out that your assertion neglects to address the extreme political and social impact of poets like Hughes, McKay, Johnson--and the entire Harlem Renaissance, really--but then again, the big empty space on your syllabus says enough about your opinion on them.”

Erwin was standing now, frame unfolding like an accordion, elongating as he stepped out into the aisle, eyes searching for that familiar voice, that golden skin.

The boy had never stopped wearing the black NOLA hat. It figured. He leaned casually back in his seat, small body taut with muscles Erwin could imagine beneath his fingers, smooth skin he could feel against his back, his stomach. Levi had hardly changed at all, and the sight of him punctured the well in Erwin’s chest, a needle widening a pinhole. It was like everything was draining out of him at once, every question and insecurity and wanting, late-night hand. _Where were you? Why did you leave? Why are you here now? Did you ever love me?_

He thought he must have made a sound, because eyes were turning towards him. The only ones that stuck were gray, cold and unsurprised, lingering on his blue ones. Closed doors. There was nothing there, no recognition, no desire, no answers. It was Ithaca all over again--their moment, missed. There was always a missed moment.

Erwin stumbled back into the heat, his backpack clutched in his sweating palm. He looked back over his shoulder. Levi hadn’t followed him.

As he passed into the shade of University Hall, his heart in his mouth, he wondered why he’d left. Was he still so afraid? There had been a million opportunities back then, a thousand words he might have said into a telephone or in a text message or in an email--he’d never tried. Never reached out. The disappearance of Levi Ackerman had been the grand mute on his world of sound, on the city where he’d fucked a hundred times since but had never heard, never tasted. He could taste it now--sugar, in the back of his mouth. 

On the 1 train the tears came, waves on Riis beach. No one paid him any mind. It was one of those Manhattan things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took a literal millennium--hope you guys enjoyed this chapter! the song erwin's listening to is called 'the garden that you planted' and it's by sea wolf.
> 
> as always, kudos and comments are much appreciated! 
> 
> xo


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